It all Started with Sljivo

My name is Ben Marich!

I am a 100% disabled Marine Vietnam combat veteran. After years of struggling with PTSD and other disabilities, I received and was assisted in training a service dog,  later to become a therapy dog. We got Sljivo, my puppy, when she was six weeks old. Over the coming months, she became my service dog, comforting me during anxiety attacks and loud noise situations, and alerting me to situational awareness situations, such as people or crowds behind me.

We were later trained as a therapy team. As a therapy team, we would visit special needs children individually and in schools, disabled veterans, veterans’ hospitals and clinics, and in the field. Sljivo had an innate ability, as do most dogs, to sense those with issues and comfort them, as well as me.

She was trained to ignore wheelchairs and therapeutic devices in medical settings and never to pick up things on the floor in hospitals or clinics. We would often do reading programs in libraries when Sljivo and I would sit on the library floor, and children would read to her when they would seldom read to adults. Once the child began reading to Sljivo, counselors and parents had an open door to work with the children.

These are only a few examples of what she did for me and for so many others over her 15 ½ years on the planet.